If your willing to travel about 1 hour 15 minutes from New York there's a place called Wesco Sports Center in Brookfield CT. They have a whole floor dedicated to just goalie gear and have a bunch of used stuff too. In my experience they have a much better selection of goalie gear than Pure Hockey. http://www.wescosportscenter.com/

One thing that I noticed in the first drill, and something that will definitely affect your slides, is that you don't always bring your head and hands to the puck as it travels. A lot of your power from your slides comes from the rotational motion of your upper body, and your lower body will tend to follow suit. Overall good work, just keep playing cause these movements aren't very natural at first.

I think the way this works from a game mechanics standpoint is that the wall registers if an enemy champion is in the wall at a given interval, say every .25 seconds. So if you make it through the wall without hitting one of these intervals, you won't be slowed. However, if you're in the wall during an interval you get slowed. That's why generally the people who do get slowed are the ones with slower moving dashes such as Corki and Sejuani. The same principle applies to Veigar's E. I think it could be fixed if Riot shortened the interval on which the wall checks if someone is in it, but this increases the strain on the computer.

In all seriousness if you can find two friend who are around the same Elo you should be able to stomp 3v3 if you just turtle to late game with an AD Carry. Also, most people in 3v3 ranked aren't nearly as technically skilled as those in SR.

I was done at around your ELO at the start of the season thanks to a similar thing. I've managed to work my way up to the mid-high 1300's now, and I'd say the biggest thing you can do (other than just improving mechanically) is to improve ur communication and to stay positive. It's ridiculous some of the comebacks you can make in Solo Queue, especially with how hard some people throw games. So always stay positive and reinforce that you "got this" to your teammates.

I'm always positive when I play and I find that it's one of the best things you can do to improve your results when you play, especially in solo queue.

That said, one of the most difficult things I've found in general when conversing with people is to try to calm them down when they are mad. That's what makes it so hard to improve the community because if you try to calm someone down when they're made you often just make them even more angry.